Last stop in our Europe trip is my sis's current residence at Einhoven (Amsterdam). Woke up very early to go to the train station to take Thalys (express train to Brussel then to Rotterdam before changing the internal Amsterdam train.The train network & seats in Europe are pretty big & on time (minus the hiccup in Epernay).

Finally.. reached my sis's apartment! Love her apartment to bits. Nice view & home by yourself is really nice.

After putting down our luggage, we went out to shop & had a buffet dinner at Einhoven central. Came back with bags full of Zara and H&M clothes, perfumes & lotsa body shop lotions (mum bot for my aunts).



Lunch at Hard Rock Cafe Amsterdam.. the 1st hard rock cafe I went & I love the culture & food.

My Loots from Europe Trip... hope to go back again.

Last night in Europe was home cooked food with love & toasting to Rose Champagne!!! <3

Ending off with my Christmas gift for Dear last year.. Wallet from Mont Blanc. *love*

p/s: i was testing whether my blogspot account can upload photos & surprisingly the account is full error msg no longer appear. yeah! means I can continue blogging! *grinz*

Took a 2hrs train to Epernay for Moet & Chandon tour & reached the little town just before lunch.

We ate at this French restaurant that's super duper good.. until now I'm still loving the escargot.

Luckily we reached slightly before lunch & managed to get a table before the lunch crowd. Ambiance was nice too. We ordered 2 flasks of rose wine to share & it was nice. Cheers!

We ordered a 3 course set meal each & it was soooo good!!!! But the serving time was a little long.. I guess French people like to sit down & talk during meals. We took 2hrs plus to eat lunch & were nearly late for our tour.

First up were the appetizers. We order different appetizers so that we could try all of them. Mine was the smoked salmon, my mum's was foie gras with prawns & avocado & my sis's ham was the worst. Actually I think the ham is not that bad.. juz that maybe the serving was too much for an appetizer. My sis & I ordered escargot on top of the set lunch to share & it was delicious! I love the herb thingy they use to cook the escargot. Simply heavenly & I don't mind going Epernay again & this restaurant specifically for the escargot.

Next was the main course & we were so boring we all ordered the same dish because we didn't understand what the rest of the dishes were. The menu was in FRENCH & the waitress can't really speak English. Nonetheless, the salmon was nice & the pasta was very well cooked & flavored too (although it looks plain here).

Lastly, we had to ask the waitress to serve dessert & we basically gobbled our dessert up because we were running late. Then we practically ran to the Moet factory.. luckily the waitress gave us some directions. If not, we'll be so lost.

 

At Moet & Chandon.. 

Tourof how champagne is made.. the cellar was HUGE!

After the tour, we had champagne tasting. We registered for the same type of champagne tour thinking if we register diff ones, we'll be brought to diff cellar. Actually the type of champagne is what we get to drink at the end. So some groups actually ordered diff so they can share & try a variety. Nonetheless, we bot a bottle of rose & a bottle grand so we got to try all too!

The normal Moet & Chandon champagne in their signature flute. Cheers!

And then it's time to leave Epernay.. so sad. I like this place. Snowy & cold outside.

Reached the train station & was told the train employees went on STRIKE! So our trains were cancelled. We spent 1 hr waiting at the station before taking a cab back to Paris & the cab fare cost us ard 250 euro.

Day started well but didn't end too well.

It was a long and tiring day because we went to quite a few attractions in a day! Louvre, Arc De Triomphe, Champ Elysees, and Eiffel Tower.. covered all in a day! Omg!!!!! That's quite a number of places. We could have gone to Notre Dame Cathedral too when we change train there but we were too tired and we still had to buy train tickets to Epernay for the next day. The queue for the Epernay tickets was long and we were so tired and exhausted at the end of the day, we had mac for dinner instead of some fancy French cuisine because we were tired to search for food. Mac was quite convenient because it was on our 2mins walk back to our hotel from the subway and we could takeaway to eat in the comfort of our room and rest early.

Start of our 2nd day in Paris.. woke up bright and early, bought pastry from the famous bakery near our hotel and arrived at our 1st destination.. Louvre museum at 9am. We bought 2 pastries each, 1 choc + 1 croissant but I dropped my choc bun and I was soooo sad because it was nice and I only ate half! That's the problem of eating on the go.. but it saves time. Loitered around Louvre for ard 1hr to take photos and walked around to soak in the beautiful architecture. We didn't go into the museum because it was closed. I didn't intend to go in anyway although my colleagues told me it's a must. I don't think I'll admire those art pieces other than Mona Lisa and it wouldn't be worth it to go in and search for Mona Lisa for a few hrs only to stand in front for 5mins.

Here are some photos I took at Louvre.. before we went in..

At the top level.. which was covered in fog. We shouldn't have bought the tix to the top when the counter told us there's heavy fog and visibility limited. Didn't expect it to be so bad. So we went down very quickly.
 

Running out of storage space on blogger already.. so I'm going to figure out a way to blog photos without having to purchase additional storage.

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